Ask Q3 Revenue Up; IAC, Not So Much

InterActiveCorp, owners of such diverse properties as the Home Shopping Network, Evite, Match.com, TicketMaster, CitySearch and perennial favorite underdog search engine Ask.com, released their Q3 numbers today—and their total numbers aren’t so good:

However, there is good news. Apparently, the home shopping industry is turning around! What? I know that you’re up watching those informercials at 3 AM.

Oh, and the revenue of the media and advertising unit (which includes Ask.com) is up 40%. While that wouldn’t be good enough for Google (who was, if you’ll recall, a “failure” with only 58% growth in Q2), this is Ask, people!

IAC said that “Ask.com revenue grew, due to an increase in revenue per query and queries.”

This is good news all around—not just for Ask and IAC. Any search engine that can gain ground in number of queries and revenue per query is a reminder that Google hasn’t quite cornered the market and those other guys still have a place in the market.

The media & advertising unit saw $189.8 M in revenue this quarter, up from $135.5 M in Q3 2006. Their operating income (including amortization) came to $15.4 M, which doesn’t sound like much compared to their revenue, but is quite a bit of an improvement over the $2.1M loss reported last year.

As long as the rest of the company doesn’t come crashing down around them, it appears that Ask.com is doing something right!

http://www.thevanblog.com Steven Bradley

Definitely good to see Ask doing well, though I certainly wasn’t expecting that growth. Does that mean the commercials are working?